2nd World Public Relations Festival, ‘Communicating for Diversity, with Diversity, in Diversity’: Main Implications and Summary of the Contents

This paper covers the main and essential points of the conference proceedings produced on the occasion of the 2005 World Public Relations Festival held in Trieste, Italy, from June 28 to June 30. The Festival was organized by Toni Muzi Falconi, businessman and Professor of the University of Udine, in cooperation with Ferpi (Italian Public Relations Federation) and the Global Alliance of Public Relations and Communication Management. It focused on the issue of diversity and public relations in all its richness and different dimensions and explored the many new challenges with which communication professionals need to deal within an increasingly complex and globalised context. Communicators who wish to build positive and strong relationships with their growing stakeholder publics need to be aware of increasing diversities and to deal with them effectively. Nowadays one of the principal tasks of public relations professionals consists in reflecting the complexity of the environment and understanding the different attitudes, values and expectations of its interlocutors, possibly through a one-with-one dialogue. There are three main communication issues in the process of dialogue with the stakeholders:  communicating for diversity, considered a value in itself to be communicated as a permanent aspect of organizational policy (the why of communicating);  communicating with diversity, in all its features, interacting differently with increasingly diverse interlocutors (with whom one communicates);  communicating in diversity, adopting and reviewing all available methods, channels and tools to ensure the effectiveness of communication processes and recognising the fluid and changing environment in which today’s organizations perform (the how to communicate).